by Rick Gekoski
In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him ‘personal’. Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
When I hear Eliot in this magisterial frame of mind I often suspect he has something to hide. There is something wonderfully perceived here, yet also egregiously wrong. Who is it, what sort of deformed being, who has no personality and no emotions?
The new Mrs Eliot had plenty of both. Eliot had married the charming, highly intelligent and distinctly unstable Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915. (He didn’t tell his parents.) A period of his poetic production ends at this point, as the languid melancholy of Prufrock (1915) is increasingly replaced by, and culminates in, the sustained misery of The Waste Land. Vivienne was an acute reader of, and occasional contributor to, the manuscript of the poem as it evolved – it was she who wrote ‘WONDERFUL’ in the margin of the poem’s section A Game of Chess, with its harrowing failure of communication between two lovers, whom it is difficult not to imagine as the poet and his wife.
Indeed, The Waste Land is shadowed by her presence. Most of the poem’s women are her: she is the remembered hyacinth girl, the languidly miserable chess player, the sexually inert typist. The Waste Land was written during the poet’s nervous collapse, and its references to Margate Sands (where ‘I can connect Nothing with nothing’) and Lake Leman (where ‘I sat down and wept’) correlate to his visits to those places in 1921. The ‘I’ in these sections feels more personal than at any other point in the poem. In Geneva he was consulting a psychotherapist, and there is a powerful temptation, even without knowing this, to read the poem as documentation of extreme, if generalized, personal suffering.
It would be impertinent to speculate on exactly what had gone wrong between the couple, but it is widely conjectured that sexual relations between them had broken down catastrophically. Do the recurring images of this sere, sterile and implacably inhuman landscape invite the reader to imagine a dry and impenetrable vagina? And surely Eliot’s therapist might have inquired about the location of the horrifying ‘rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones’? What is one to make of the Fisher King – the sexually maimed figure whose presence haunts the text – ‘fishing in the dull canal’? Anyone with a grounding in psychological interpretation would have a field day with this.
The poem is filled with the echoes and cadences of what Eliot had read and been moved by, and its view of the self – that it is inhabited by fragments and broken images derived from reading and thinking – was wholly recognizable, and increasingly my own. I felt a curious kinship with this unhappy Eliot, mon semblable, mon frère. And so T.S. joined Holden, Allen, and Walt – add Albert, and Franz, and Jean-Paul, add a lot of new other voices, not just ‘existentionalists’ – in the echo chamber of my emerging sense of myself. It was no wonder I responded to the poem so intensely, felt invaded by its multitude of influences, voices and cadences, by its confusion regarding stable identity: for that exciting brief period, The Waste Land was me.
As I write this in my office, opposite me sits my most recent purchase: the Jacob Epstein bust, in green patinated bronze, of T.S. Eliot. Created in 1951, in an edition of six, it is a wonderful work of art, without the brutalism of many Epstein bronzes, with a delicate and moving serenity as the poet bends his head slightly forward, as if listening intently. His tie is heavily knotted, and stands out like a lump in his throat. He reminds me, in his almost beatific dignity, of my father.
When Eliot’s bust first arrived, I would pat him on the cheeks in the morning to say hello, but it soon felt impertinent. Only Mrs Eliot – owner of one of the other five busts – should be allowed such an intimacy. She was once asked by Colin St John Wilson, architect of the new British Library, if he might borrow the bust in order to have a copy made, to sit in the foyer of the library.
‘I could never allow that!’ said Valerie.
‘It wouldn’t take long,’ said the urbane and persuasive Wilson. ‘I’d have it back to you in a couple of days, and he would sit in pride of place as you enter the library. What better tribute could there be?’
‘It’s quite impossible! I need him. I talk to him during the day, and I kiss him goodnight before I go to bed.’
Wilson retreated, knowing when he was beaten. I understood Mrs Eliot’s impulse. For a time I considered kissing my bust of the poet goodnight when I closed my office, but I was too embarrassed, and now I settle for a little wave of farewell. He reigns quietly on the shelf in the corner. Sometimes when people come in to the shop they notice him, but usually they don’t. I find this surprising, and am rather shocked by it.
5
DESCARTES, HUME AND THE MIRACLE OF LOVE
I will suppose, then, not that Deity, who is sovereignly good and the fountain of truth, but that some malignant demon, who is at once exceedingly potent and deceitful, has employed all his artifice to deceive me; I will suppose that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, figures, sounds, and all external things, are nothing better than the illusions of dreams, by means of which this being has laid snares for my credulity.
René Descartes, Meditations, Book I
It was one of the hits of 1961, and caught perfectly yet discreetly the prevailing sexual mores. In the Shirelles’ ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ the singer seems to be contemplating sex with a boyfriend, and wishes reassurance that she is loved for herself and not just for her body. The song ends:
Tonight with words unspoken
You say that I’m the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?
I’d like to know that your love
Is love I can be sure of
So tell me now, and I won’t ask again
Will you still love me tomorrow?
She knows not to nag, but is aware that men can feel differently in the morning. I know it was always thus, but it was more so in 1961: girls gave themselves for love, and boys fell in love in order to be given girls.
We recognize in the Shirelles’ plaintive cry a version of that need for reassurance sought by the philosophers: how can we be sure that the future will resemble the past? Can we be entirely confident that the sun will rise tomorrow? The Shirelles knew that it would (I love ‘when the night meets the morning sun’), but their emotional and epistemological angst moves me in a way that mere philosophy never could.
Of course, none of this had occurred to me in my final year of high school. ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ was just one of a number of good songs, slow and smoochy, that made life sweet. No, I didn’t start to think like this until 1962, during that freshman year at the University of Pennsylvania, as a student of Philosophy 101: Rationalism and Empiricism.
I’d done some philosophy with dear Miss Wyeth, read the ancients, some Montaigne and Erasmus, monkeyed about with the major philosophical questions regarding goodness, or the existence of God. So, unlike many of the first-year philosophy students, I was neither in search of the meaning of life, nor signing up to study a set of works through which I hoped to improve myself. No, I knew that philosophy was abstract, logical and impersonal, and would contrast sharply with my courses in English. Reading literature sounded your feelings as well as your intelligence and discrimination, while philosophy rigorously and impersonally interrogated the way you understood the world. There seemed no strong reason to choose between them – at least until my third year, when one would become my major, the other my minor.
Our sparkly and inspiring teaching assistant Mr Varnedoe, who was to become a mentor and lifetime friend, opened the course with the admonition that unless we ‘cultivated’ discipline as readers, we were unlikely to ‘till any philosophical potatoes’. We began by reading Spinoza�
�s Ethics, which I wanted to admire because my father did, but didn’t, and Leibniz, who seemed to believe the world consisted of monads, likened by commentators to building blocks which could be imagined as ping-pong balls. This seemed improbable until Mr Varnedoe suggested one think instead of atoms. That made sense, but it still wasn’t very interesting.
It was only when we read the Meditations that I got excited. Descartes began by suggesting that nothing be taken as knowledge unless it was beyond any imaginable doubt. He would – he suggested one joined him – doubt universally. Not only would we do that, we would also imagine that an omnipotent being, malign rather than beneficent, had made it his project to make us believe what was not the case.
I’m eating an orange? How do I know that? Could my senses deceive me? Might I be dreaming? Might that miserable imp, the malevolent demon, be fooling me in some way, perhaps with an apple that looks and tastes like an orange? Anyway, was there really any ‘me’ that could feel, and taste, and come to a conclusion? Perhaps I was not dreaming myself, perhaps I was a phantom in someone else’s dream? Nevertheless, Descartes maintains, there is something left, even in this miasma of doubt, and that is the fact that some thinking is going on, and the ‘I’ who is thinking is myself. The fact that I am thinking means that I must exist. In the classical formulation: ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Now that was fun, that was terrific. It didn’t matter that there was clearly something wrong in the argument – (all that the perceived ‘thinking’ can really establish is the conclusion that ‘thinking is going on’, and not that there is some ‘I’, much less me, who is doing it) – because I liked the method every bit as much as the conclusion. I loved doubting in the way that fanatical believers adore God. I felt the spirit of Holden Caulfield stirring, newly animated, as if he had come to college with me. We both felt free at last. Now it wasn’t people that were phoney, but ideas and beliefs. I found myself moving from the kinetic, balky opposition of my high school attitudes to something more powerful and satisfying: a capacity to doubt based on reason rather than emotion.
But if I had been stimulated by Descartes, I was bowled over by first reading Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which took Cartesian doubt to a new level by applying it empirically to what we think we know of the external world, by holding up our unconsidered basic truths to sceptical analysis. Bertrand Russell describes the method clearly, in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: ‘The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.’ Thus Hume begins with the unarresting observation that if you hit the white billiard ball into the red, the red will carom away, and ends with the startling conclusion that there is nothing incontrovertibly necessary about this effect:
For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second billiard ball is a quite distinct event from the motion in the first, nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other.
It is no overstatement to say that such arguments and considerations radically altered the way in which I saw, engaged with, and described the world. I walked about campus lost in a fug of speculation like a reincarnated medieval cleric. What if a woman were to give birth to a fish, or an apple ascend after leaving the tree? Why should they not do so?
This had inevitable emotional consequences. One Saturday afternoon, after my girlfriend and I had enjoyed ourselves in bed, she nestled her head into my shoulder to ask if I would always love her. At that very moment it seemed inconceivable that I would not, but I nevertheless gave the question the due consideration that it was so obviously not expected to prompt.
‘I don’t see how I could say that,’ I said.
Her head popped up, tears pooling in her eyes.
‘Why not, what’s the matter?’
‘It simply isn’t the sort of thing you can be certain of, is it?’ I asked, in that irritating, pompous voice I was starting to adopt for academic disputation (and still do).
‘Is there somebody else?’ she asked.
‘Certainly not!’ What a misunderstanding!
I explained Hume’s arguments on induction to her, certain that this would clarify why it was that I could not, with any philosophical integrity, promise that which could not be guaranteed.
She listened carefully, and at the end of my disquisition stood up and started to dress.
‘I think we should go to dinner now,’ she said. ‘I’m getting hungry.’
The subject was never mentioned again, nor did she again inquire if I would still love her tomorrow. A girl raised on the Shirelles knows not to nag. She was a bit standoffish for a while, but I knew women could be irrational. No wonder there were no women philosophers.
But if this was an emotional disaster – though I did not recognize it as such at the time – there were further humiliations attendant on my Humean discipleship. In my sophomore year I took a course on The Philosophy of Religion, with a philosophical cleric by the name of Evans.
We ran through the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God, read widely in the ancients and medievals, and ended with Hume’s essay ‘Of Miracles’. The argument went like this: what is more likely, that a miracle has occurred, or that the human testimony on its behalf is faulty? Given that no instance of a miracle has been adequately proven, is it not foolish to believe them possible? To believe that a break in the laws of nature has occurred seems to depend on the credulousness of those who witness the supposed ‘miracle’, and of those who credit their testimony.
These arguments seemed sensible if unexceptional; what interested me more, though, was the manner in which they were presented. Unlike, say, Locke, whose prose is lumpy, utilitarian and consistently unremarkable, Hume is sprightly, accessible, and always anxious to please. There is something almost boyish about his eagerness to enter into direct contact with his readers. He enlists the evidence of our natural responses, and solicits agreement through the commonality of human experience. He begins the essay ‘Of Miracles’ by citing Dr Tillotson’s argument against ‘real presence’, before going on to add: ‘I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures.’
The slow accumulation of clauses beckons the reader into agreement, inviting him to share the exploration, not merely to concur with its conclusions, so much as coming to them himself, with Hume as his guide.
But, however engaging the tone and satisfying the arguments, there was something odd about the essay, which (given that it is published as part of An Enquiry) seemed curiously to miss the point.
I raised my hand.
‘I don’t quite understand this,’ I said.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I can’t figure out why Hume needs all of these ancillary arguments, when it is obvious from his epistemological position that there can be no such thing as a miracle...’
Mr Evans looked puzzled.
‘Although he refers to a miracle as a break in “the laws of nature”, all that a law of nature can be, if you follow his reasoning, is a long and unbroken series of spatial and temporal connections between two events. After sustained experience, we assume that seas do not part, nor will the sun cease to rise. But if one day either were to happen, this might only mean that we had had insufficient experience to see it coming, as an astronomically unsophisticated audience might regard a solar eclipse as miraculous. There can thus be no miracles, because the miraculous would seem to involve a break in the connection between things, and no such connection can be shown to be necessary.’
I exhaled mightily.
‘I think you are right,’ he said after a moment. ‘That is a really interesting line of thought.’ (He was wrong, as I was, for Hume is neither so lax nor so fo
olish as to have no answer to my objection.)
When, some weeks later, the final exam came round, I was very confident. I’d loved the course, done the reading obsessionally, revised the probable exam topics. But I was rather surprised to see, as question six (you had to do three of nine): ‘Describe why Hume’s arguments about miracles are unnecessary in the light of his epistemology.’ I could do at least seven of the questions perfectly well, but, having been offered this treat, I chose to take it. I reaffirmed and added to my original classroom arguments, did two other questions, and was rewarded with an ‘A’ in the course. What a dope. It would have been more stylish to have ignored the bone proffered to the good little doggy. I would have been proud to take such an attitude, had it occurred to me, but sadly it did not. I gobbled up my freebie, unaware of something unseemly in the process. It still rather embarrasses me.
I think I fell for this generously offered titbit because I was already recognizing that philosophy was too hard for me. Once I had read the major philosophers it was clear that they were a lot smarter than me, and that I could hardly even follow some of their thinking. (Test case: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.) Philosophy, like maths or physics, tests and defines the limits of our understanding and intelligence. You know what you can’t do when you study philosophy.